History: Phase I (2007-2011)

In October 2007, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced an initial $10 million grant to fund the first systematic effort to integrate law and neuroscience. (Read the official press release here). Funding Phase I of the Law and Neuroscience Project extended the Foundation’s long tradition of fostering interdisciplinary, integrative, and collaborative research that furthers social justice. Given the large gaps between legal and neuroscientific cultures – in their knowledge bases, goals, norms, and vocabularies – Phase I represented one of the most ambitious interdisciplinary bridges ever begun. It gathered and harnessed the collective talents of several dozen leading neuroscientists and legal scholars to explore a number of empirical and conceptual frontiers at this interdisciplinary nexus.

Phase I was remarkably productive, and it catalyzed research that has already reached United States courtrooms, law school classrooms, legal scholarship, and new conferences on law and neuroscience. This page provides historical information on the Project’s initial four years of operation.

Phase I: Mission & Accomplishments

Phase I of the Law and Neuroscience Project pulled together several dozen of the nation’s most talented neuroscientists and legal scholars to work closely together in collaborative research never before achieved. Phase I showed that there are concerned and committed researchers, in both disciplines, willing and eager to come together to help the criminal justice system understand neuroscientific evidence, avoid misuses and misinterpretation, and explore ways to constructively use findings from cognitive neuroscience to improve the administration of justice.

Phase I ultimately pursued several over-arching research questions at the intersection of neuroscience and law that were intended to:

Improve legal decisions about the responsibility of transgressors for their actions;

Further identify factors that can affect blameworthiness assessments;

Illuminate the processes by which jurors and judges make decisions about criminal liability and punishment;

Enable more reliable identification of deceptive testimony;

Increase law’s abilities to evaluate the reliability of memories on which testimony is based;

Aid law’s abilities to predict recidivism and future dangerousness;

Assess distinctions between neuroscientific evidence that should and should not be admitted in various criminal law contexts; and

Aid the proper interpretation, by jurors and judges, of neuroscientific evidence.

At the most general level, the accomplishments of Phase I include:

Establishing the conceptual foundations of law and neuroscience, as a new disciplinary intersection;

Building a common language (e.g., through cross-education about terms of art);

Prepared an eight-chapter Primer for Judges on Law and Neuroscience (forthcoming from Oxford University Press);

Published the Judge's Guide to Neuroscience: A Concise Introduction;

Prepared the first Law and the Brain course book for law students (forthcoming from Aspen Publishers);

Published a Law and Neuroscience Bibliography consisting of 565 entries;

Developed syllabi for, and taught, courses on Law and Neuroscience in both law schools and psychology departments;

Prepared the first chapter on Law and Neuroscience in the Federal Judicial Center’s Manual of Scientific Evidence (3rd. Ed.); and

Created a Law and Neuroscience Project web site (www.lawneuro.org) that now receives an average of over 1,000 unique hits per month, from over 50 countries worldwide.

The broad range of neurolaw topics explored in all this work included, among other things:

criminal responsibility

brain development

criminal mental states

lie and memory detection

appreciation of risk

addiction

punishment and juror decision-making

evidentiary rules

effect of neuroimages on juror decision-making

causation

advanced neuroscientific data analysis methods

trends in use of neuroscientific evidence

moral decision-making

psychopathy

neuroethics

conscious will

neuroprediction

race biases

public perception of neuroscience

neuroscience legislation

the dependence of law on psychology

Through this interdisciplinary activity, Phase I produced a wealth of neuroscience research, legal scholarship, and deliverables that have already begun to enter into and affect the legal system.

Phase I: Governance & Members

The initial governance structure, through June 2010, of Phase I of the Law and Neuroscience Project was as follows:

Director

Co-Director

Co-Director

Michael S. Gazzaniga

Stephen Morse

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Director, Sage Center for the Study of the Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara

Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law; Professor of Psychology and Law in Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania

Chauncey Stillman Professor in Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University

Executive Director

Andrew MansfieldSage Center for the Study of the Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara

Working Group Co-Directors

Each of the two working groups was overseen by three Co-Directors:

Hank Greely, Stanford Law School

Owen Jones, Vanderbilt University

Marc Raichle, Washington University in St. Louis

Stephen Morse, University of Pennsylvania

Scott Grafton, University of California, Santa Barbara

Robert Desimone, MIT

Governing Board

The parts of the Law and Neuroscience Project were integrated under a Governing Board consisting of the Director of the Project, one co-director of each working group, and at least an equal number of other members from outside of the Initiative:

Sandra Day O'Connor, Former Supreme Court Justice (Honorary Chair)

Michael Gazzaniga, University of California, Santa Barbara (Chair)

Stephen Hyman, Harvard University

Stephen Morse, University of Pennsylvania

Marcus Raichle, Washington University in St. Louis

Jed Rakoff, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York

Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia

The Governing Board met at least once each year in person as well as regularly through email, telephone, and/or videoconference. The Governing Board made all large-scale decisions regarding policy, direction, and funding for the Project as a whole, as well as any decisions regarding adding or removing participants in the Project. The Governing Board received an annual report from each working group and from the Education and Outreach Program, evaluated the performance of these entities, and issued an annual report to the MacArthur Foundation.

Phase I Members (in alphabetical order)

Kathryn Abrams, University of California, Berkeley School of Law

Richard Bonnie, University of Virginia School of Law

Silvia Bunge, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Psychology

Michael Saks, Arizona State University, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law

Jeff Schall, Vanderbilt University, Department of Psychology

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Duke University, Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics

Anthony Wagner, Stanford University, Department of Psychology

Gary Watson, University of Southern California, Department of Philosophy

Amy Wax, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Susan Wolf, University of Minnesota Law School

Gideon Yaffe, University of Southern California, Department of Philosophy

Phase I: Education & Outreach

In addition to the research projects themselves, Phase I built institutional capacity to facilitate dialogue about law and neuroscience both within and beyond the Project. This section discusses Phase I’s conferences, monographs, education and outreach to judges, and development of a law school coursebook.

Conferences. The Phase I grant called for three annual Project meetings. Phase I exceeded this goal, holding nine total meetings (3 each year), three of which were larger, annual meetings. The meetings allowed working groups the time they needed to design research, discuss results, and coordinate dissemination.

Monographs. In addition to meetings for project members, Phase I sponsored seven conferences designed to bring both project members and other scholars together around specialized topics: Psychopathy and Criminal Responsibility; Conscious Will and Responsibility After Libet; Junior Scholars in Law & Neuroscience; Neural Detection of Pain; Psychopathy and the Law; Memory and Law; and Bioprediction. The Phase I proposal projected three monographs would emerge from these specialized conferences, but four were actually produced: (1) Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet; (2) Handbook on Psychopathy and Law; (3) Memory and Law; and (4) Bioprediction. The Libet monograph is now in print, and the other three monographs are under contract with Oxford, a leading publisher in this area. Moreover, Phase I also produced a ten chapter Working Paper on Responsibility; spurred a Phase I project member to draft a forthcoming book on the brains of legal decision makers; and allowed another Phase I member the resources to complete an edited volume on the future of punishment.

Outreach to Judges. Phase I operated an Education & Outreach program for judges, and was able to conduct significantly more judicial education programming than envisioned under the grant. While the grant originally called for three retreats for judges, the program instead delivered seven fully hosted conferences. The topics covered at the conferences included: an introduction to neuroscience; presentations on frontal lobe function including decision making, behavioral control, and counter-factual thinking; a discussion of applications to criminal law; and presentations on measuring individual variation and subjective states including lie detection, pain assessment, and punishment. In addition to those major conferences, the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research also put on fifteen smaller conferences in partnership with a variety of state judicial organizations, for instance the California Judges Association. These conferences have introduced law and neuroscience techniques and issues to nearly 800 judges over the past three years.

The indirect effects of these efforts are much larger, as judges who attend the conference share information with their colleagues on the bench. Formal partnerships between the Gruter Institute, FJC, and NJC allow the neuroscience information to spread throughout the extensive FJC and NJC judicial networks. The FJC is the research and education agency of the federal judicial system. The NJC offers an average of 90 courses annually with more than 2,000 judges enrolling from all 50 states, U.S. territories and more than 150 countries.

Coursebook. Finally, Phase I invested in the development of the first Law and Neuroscience coursebook for law students (forthcoming from Aspen Legal Publishers). Co-authored by Phase I members Owen Jones and Jeffrey Schall, and joined by former fellow Francis Shen, the 32-chapter book will prepare law students to enter a legal market in which neuroscientific research on behavior is increasingly prominent. Phase I funding allowed for the hiring of multiple research assistants, necessary to compile a book of this magnitude (800 pages in hard copy, plus 500 pages of e-supplement and a lengthy teacher’s manual). The coursebook builds off of three years of Jones and Schall teaching the subject at Vanderbilt, where student demand is high (with 44 students in Spring 2011). Demand for the course is similarly picking up at other law schools, as a growing number of professors are teaching the course.

Phase I Project member Martha Farah was featured in a Cell Press Neuroscience Newsletter podcast, discussing with TiCS editor Stavroula Kousta the current state of neurolaw and the legal implications of neuroscientific research. Link to Podcast » (see right hand side).

Phase I Project members Morris Hoffman, Francis Shen, Owen Jones, Joshua Greene, and Rene Marois posted their article "Sorting Guilty Minds" on SSRN (forthcoming in the New York University Law Review). Link to Article ».

Phase I Project member Walter Sinnott-Armstrong discussed Neuroscience in the Law as part of a webcast in the Duke University Office Hours series. Link to Video».

Phase I Project members Stephen Morse, Josh Greene, and Kent Kiehl addressed the question, Can Genes and Brain Abnormalities Create Killers? on NPR's Talk of the Nation, hosted by Neal Conan. Link to Transcript and Audio».

Phase I Project member Josh Greene was interviewed in a story on NPR about a recent PNAS article entitled Disruption of the right temporoparietal junction with transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces the role of beliefs in moral judgments. The NPR story is available at the following link. Link to Story». Discovery News provides a synopsis of the article. Link to Article».

Phase I Project members Owen Jones, Jeffrey Schall, and Rene Marois (together with Vanderbilt University graduate student Joshua Buckholtz) published Brain Imaging for Legal Thinkers: A Guide for the Perplexed in the Stanford Technology Law Review. Link to Article».

Phase I Project Director Michael Gazzaniga quoted in short USA Today article entitled Who killed John Lennon? Science looks at brain and the law. Link to Article».

Phase I Project member Kent Kiehl testified in the sentencing trial of admitted murderer Brian Dugan. Kiehl relied on imaging data in his expert testimony and this effort is profiled in Miller-McCune, A Mind of Crime: How brain-scanning technology is redefining criminal culpability.Link to Article».

Project members William Newsome and Joshua Greene were featured in an episode of the Brain Series on the Charlie Rose Show. Link to Video».

Phase I Project member Kent Kiehl and Joshua Buckholtz of Vanderbilt University recently published Inside the Mind of a Psychopath in Scientific American. Link to Article ».